opportunities for knowing it. But since then there have been very great advances, both quantitative and qualitative, in musical education. We have spread it broadcast, in the increasing faith that appreciation depends, not on technical knowledge or executive skill, but on the responsive temperament and the will to understand. Familiarity, familiarity at home if possible, is the key to this understanding; and in this connexion there is, I believe, an enormous educational future before pianolas and gramophones, if only the preparation of their records can be taken in hand on artistic rather than narrowly commercial lines. And our standards of judgement have risen we do not worship quite so blindly mere names, whether of the past or of the present, nor exalt the performer quite so dizzily above what is performed. Nor do we quite so glibly disguise our indifference to vital distinctions by talking about differences of taste: we know that, however catholic we may rightly be within the limits of the good, whether grave or gay, there comes sooner or later, in our judgement of musical as of all other spiritual values, a point where we must put our foot down. We are going on, and our theories are sound enough but the path of a democratically widened, and rightly so widened, art is by no means easy. The principle of levelling up slides so readily into the practice of levelling down: and the book of music is closed once for all if we are to accept the plenary inspiration of majorities.

But here in England the greatest danger to musical progress is, I venture to think, the self-styled practical Englishman-fortified as he is by the consciousness that, for at any rate a couple of centuries or more, we have as a nation taken a low view of the arts and have been rather proud of it than otherwise. It is so obvious that no profession is economically more unsound than that of the serious composer: it is not so obvious that we

owe all the great things of the spirit by which we chiefly live to those whom the world calls dreamers, among whom the great musicians have had, and, I hope and believe, will always have, no mean place. Against the practical Englishman', and all that his attitude to music involves, we can all of us fight in our respective spheres and I would commend to you for useful weapons three very different books by very different menSir Hubert Parry's great book on Style in Musical Art, Mr. C. T. Smith's account of his artistic work in an elementary school in the East End of London which he calls The Music of Life, and a pamphlet Starved Arts mean Low Pleasures recently written by Mr. Bernard Shaw for the British Music Society. And one particular line of indirect attack, easily open to all of us, is, I am inclined to think, specially promising. In the third and fourth verses of the thirty-fifth chapter of the book of Ecclesiasticus we shall find these injunctions, which I translate as literally as Greek epigrams can be translated: Do not hinder music: do not pour out chatter during any artistic performance and do not argue unseasonably.' In other words, conversation, however valuable, prevents complete listening to music; and music that is not meant to be listened to in its completeness is not worth calling music, and had much better not be there at all. Musical progress will be spiritually well on its way when we all realize this axiomatic truth as firmly as this Hebrew sage of two thousand years and more ago.

XII

THE MODERN RENASCENCE

F. MELIAN STAWELL

To understand in any degree the modern outlook on life it seems necessary to go back to the time of the French Revolution. For at that stirring epoch there flamed up in the minds of enthusiasts an ideal of man's life larger than had ever yet been known, and one that has dominated us all ever since. If we give, as I think we should give, a wide sense to the word 'Liberty' and make it mean all that stands for self-development, then one may say that this ideal was fairly well summed-up in the famous Revolutionary watchword, 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity'. It is impossible at any rate to read the idealists of that time and its sequel say from 1793 to 1848—whether in France, Germany, England, or Italy, whether inside or outside the Revolutionary ranks, without feeling their buoyant hope that a fresh era was opening in which man, casting aside old shackles and prejudices, could advance at once towards knowledge, joy, splendour, both for himself and all his fellows. Shelley, perhaps, is most typical of what I mean. Hogg laughed at him for his belief in the 'perfectibility' of the race, but Hogg knew the belief was vital to the poet. To Shelley it was a damnable doctrine that the many should ever be sacrificed to the few: yet neither was the ultimate vision that inspired him the vision of the few being sacrificed for the many. He was anything but an ascetic seeking martyrdom. The martyrdom of his Prometheus

is a prelude to the Unbinding when happiness shall flood the world:

'The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,

The vaporous exultation not to be confined!'

And not only happiness and love, but knowledge also: the Earth calls to the Sky: 'Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.' Soberer spirits shared this poet's ecstasy. Wordsworth sang

'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven.'

And that heaven was exactly this foretaste of the Spirit of Man entering undisturbed into his full inheritance at last Science welcomed as a dear and honoured guest, Poetry known as 'the breath and finer spirit that is in the countenance of all knowledge'.

It is scarcely necessary even to mention the high hopes of the French themselves, the confident anticipation of an Age of Reason when all men should be brothers and the earth bring forth all her treasures, but it is well worth noting the attitude of Goethe, an attitude the more significant because, in a sense, Goethe always stood outside the French Revolution. But he, like the best of its votaries—and this is less known than it should bedesired the development of all men every whit as much as he desired the high culture of a few. It was for the double goal that he worked. 'Only through all men,' he

only through all men, can

writes in a notable passage, mankind be made.'1 All good lies in Man, he tells us again, and must be developed, only not in one man, but in many'. Goethe, the so-called aristocrat, has given us here as true a formula for the democratic faith as could well be found. And to him; as to Shelley and to Words1 Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre, Bk. 8, c. 5.

worth, Poetry and Science were not enemies but friends dearer than sisters. Those three, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Goethe, foreshadowed a new poetry of science that has never yet been achieved, though fine work has been done by Tennyson, Whitman, Sully Prudhomme, and Meredith.

Goethe, moreover, again like Shelley and the French, broke with all ideals of mere self-abnegation. In his poem,' General Confession', he makes his disciples repent of ever having missed an opportunity for enjoyment and resolve never so to offend again. Here, as often, Goethe comes into the closest touch with our modern feeling. We, too, can never return to the Franciscan ideal of poverty, celibacy, and obedience as the highest life for man on earth. We have done with self-denial except as the means to a human end. We are still in the tide of what I would call the Modern Renascence; we claim the whole garden of the world for our own, the tree with the knowledge of good and evil included, reacting even from Christian ideals if they can make no room for that. But, after all, the characteristic of the belief dominant a century ago was exactly that such room could be made, that Hellenism could be combined with Christianity, and selfdevelopment with self-denial.

And this belief is, I think, reflected in the music of the time. Schubert, that sweetest soul of tears and laughter, understands every shade of wistfulness, and yet again and again in his music it seems as though the universe had become, to quote a lover of his, one immense and glorious blackbird. Mozart, in 'The Magic Flute', as Goethe seems to have recognized, sings the very song of union between the unreflecting joy of the natural man and the strenuous self-devotion of the awakened spirit. Beethoven, greatest of them all, plumbs the lowest depths of suffering and then astounds and comforts us by ineffable